Q: Who was the first electric detective?
A: Sherlock Ohms
Get it? This joke’s humour relies on physics knowledge (that Ohm’s law describes a fundamental relationship between electric current and potential difference). Did you laugh? Physicists have a certain kind of humour (mainly dry) and lists of science jokes are common on the internet. Humour has many positive effects: it brings people together and is useful when we interact with each other as tension release. However, we must also carefully consider why we find jokes funny. In this blog post, Maria will show how physics humour excludes people.
Physics is SO hard
Anders Johansson and I have made study of physics teachers’ jokes in the US and Scandinavia. A reoccurring theme in the jokes is that physics is hard – the core of the fun is that physics is so difficult that calling it easy must clearly be a joke. A quantum physics lecturer made a joke like this when talking about Einstein’s derivation of the photoelectric effect: ‘So, this was pretty easy. For this simple derivation he received the Nobel Prize in 1921’.
A consequence of physics being difficult is that all physicists ‘have to be smart´. This form of humour is problematic because we know that some students struggle with imposter syndrome in physics education. How does it affect these students if they continuously hear that you need to be smart to study physics? And, how does it affect the students’ learning if the subject they are supposed to learn is positioned as hard all the time?
Physics is only for geeks
Other teachers joke about physics as the only fun there is. An example of such humour is this joke: ‘This is a very important day. You can forget your birthday, forget anniversaries, but you need to remember this day, because this is the day that you will learn Newton’s Laws.’ This is an explicit instruction about how students should relate to physics: do not care about anything else.
A similar theme was that teachers make jokes about physicists being nerdy people, and make ironic comments about what a physicist can and cannot do: ‘This problem in your book says that a physicist is hiking up the Alps. You know that’s a joke, right?’. What kind of message does this joke send to the students and how do the physics students who do love to hike feel when they hear this joke? Do we really want physics students to only care about physics?
We need to be careful when making jokes!
Humour is part of creating boundaries around a subject and is always based on the norms and rules of the social context. It is not a coincidence that the physics teachers in our study made jokes about physics as difficult and physicists as geeky, since these preconceptions already exist in our society.
However, jokes have disciplining effects: jokes about stereotypical physics students may challenge these ideas but reinforce at the same time these stereotypes for students. Do we want students who don’t want to dedicate their whole life to their love of physics to feel unwelcome in physics education? If not, why do we continue to make these jokes time and again? Who is laughing in the classroom and who is not? As physics teachers’ as well as physicists, we need to be aware of this.
This blog is based on this article: Johansson, A., & Berge, M. (in press). Lecture jokes: mocking and reproducing celebrated subject positions in physics. In A. J. Gonsalves & A. Danielsson (Eds.), Physics Education and Gender: Identity as an analytic lens for research: Springer.